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Feature Articles - Women and WWI - Women at the Front: The Home Front: Suffrage and Work

Women were not the dumb creatures waiting at home blind to the horrors of war
portrayed in the bitter poems of
Siegfried Sassoon like
Glory of Women. They
weren't either the gleeful, liberated working girls and professional women that
American feminist scholar Sandra Gilbert described in her seminal article Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War (1988),
callously happy to see their menfolk fall for a patriarchal system that made
cannon fodder of them.

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There may have been women of both types but there is not
a single image that corresponds to all women, in the same way the sensitive men
who wrote most testimonials about the war - mainly upper and middle-class educated
officers - do not represent the troops at large. If it is high time to
acknowledge that women were an important part of World War I it is also high
time to acknowledge the diversity of their responses to it and the variety of
stances they undertook.

The same principle that applied at the front applied back home when it came to
making the most of upper and middle-class women's willingness to work for no
money contributing to the war effort. The same pragmatism, by no means any wish
to alter gender roles, made the Government lure working-class women into
munitions factories and all the other jobs so far done by men that were
absolutely necessary to ensure the success of Britain as a nation at war.

In any
case, the culminating point for women's lives in relation to the Great War was
the passage of the Qualification of Women Act of 1917 and the Representation of
the People Act of 1918, by which in the general election of 1918 women over 30
could for the first time vote and be elected MPs.

Constance Markievicz, a Sinn
Fein candidate, was the first to be elected although, since she renounced her
seat out of nationalist convictions, the honour of being the first woman MP went
to Nancy Astor in 1919. Ten years later, Margaret Bonfield became the first
woman minister ever (of Labour) in Ramsay McDonald's cabinet.